Repair recommendation for my Panasonic AG-DS840's glitched waterfall video

[Arclight]

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I bought a Panasonic AG-DS840 off of Facebook Marketplace that was claimed to be working; of course after I took out the pennies I heard rattling around in the bottom and put in a VHS tape and powered it up for the first time I'm greeted with a waterfall of slowly changing static bars (same type of glitch is displayed from both the S-video and composite outputs):


[Attachment 83683 - Click to enlarge]

https://youtu.be/tA3abKvq9Bw

(The flashing/strobe is just from capturing the CRT w/ my iPhone, it doesn't strobe like that to human eyes)

At least when I plugged my headphones into the front headphone jack I got clear audio playing, so it does seem to be able to play/decode the tape (or at least, the tape's audio). And the deck's display shows a time code when playing, and fast forwards and rewinds successfully (again, at least based off the audio output it seems to).

I would like to fix this but I don't know anything about VCR repair; I can read a multimeter and do basic soldering but that's about it. I probably can't navigate the electrical diagrams in a service manual. So unless by some miracle it's an easy fix, I presume I'll have to send this in somewhere for a repair... I know Deter on here fixes AG-1980Ps (and other decks) but it seems he's still on break based on his most recent posts.

So anyone have any recommendations for repair options or other insights on what I should do? Thanks in advance

[Arclight]

I wasn't able to reply to my own thread last night because it got caught in the new user black hole filter, but after letting the player run for a while, and turning it on and off a few times, I was able to get (very poor quality, no color) video on the monitor composite output:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiiU0h-5vPI


[Attachment 83711 - Click to enlarge]

It's interesting that when I go into the TBC menu or other setup menu the text overlay is clear:


[Attachment 83712 - Click to enlarge]

For whatever reason the composite video on my tiny PVM, while it looks awful, is a lot clearer than when I plug in the S-Video to my larger 14" PVM. Guessing the underlying problem explains that somehow.

So I'm guessing given the "warm-up" behavior it's a bad capacitor issue (?)... I opened up the deck and peeked around, and pulled out a couple boards to inspect, but I don't see any obvious leaking or bulging capacitors, so I guess I will need to figure out how to check the individual capacitors for actual quantifiable values within tolerance instead (I'm new to this).

I now also see a similar post on DigitalFAQ although the example videos are long gone. I guess I'll ask over there for any update as well.